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Friday, 1 February 2013

Embroidery Rose Heart

I'm sure there is an order in which one should learn embroidery stitches, perhaps starting with a basic running stitch and building up a repertoire? The only problem is that my embroidery book (The A-Z of Embroidery Stitches by Country Bumpkin Publications) provides stitch instructions in alphabetical order and offers no insight into the learning process, which left me at a bit of a loss as far as what to do for my first few projects (as you can see I'm frightfully ambitious - no "I'll just attempt a few lines of each stitch first" for me!)

It just so happens that I glanced upon the instructions for "Cast-on Stitch Roses" (there's a great tutorial with pictures here) and thought as a knitter, casting on is something that comes quite naturally and that for a beginner project, doing something within my comfort zone was probably a great idea.

To start I used a heart template downloaded from the web and traced it onto my fabric using tailors chalk. My thread colours are:

I started with the largest rose with the centre in the darkest shade, progressing to lighter shades with each layer of petals. I loved the cast on stitch and as I had envisaged, my years of knitting really did come in handy! My centre petal had a cast-on of 12, stitches, the 5 petals of the next layer had cast-ons of 16, while the outer petals had cast-ons of 19.

The outline of the heart is embroidered using "Scroll Stitch" in the darkest shade of green. I found a really wonderful and easy to follow tutorial here. While I used a three layered rose for the top centre of the heart, I varied the colour combinations and sizes as I worked my way around the piece.

One of my favourite aspects of "Cast-on Stitch" is its almost 3D effect. It's really raised from the fabric and makes the work look very substantial, even though in essence this was a quick project that I finished in just a few hours (I'm sure hoping I'll get quicker as time goes on.)

I was really quite pleased with how this turned out. I'd like to get the cast-ons a bit neater next time and spend a little more time planning the placement of the roses, but I'm looking forward to using this stitch again...so I think we can take that as a good sign that embroidery and I are becoming firm friends!

Happy stitching

Deb

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It looks like it's cast on as it is in knitting... is that right? Never knew you could do that! The results are so lush and full that it creates a perfect rose! Oops... I read more carefully and I was right. I love how skills learned in one craft can be transformed to another. Thanks for sharing!